Click on all the things under "Media: Reflections". Every word is gold. Probably most relevant to this forum is "Conspiracy".

Anyway, the most dangerous dogma used to be Communism. If the Russians had honestly evaluated communism on a hippy farm, preferably with consenting adults and with "no human rights abuses" as part of the rules, I wouldn't have had a problem with it. I'm as interested in scientific experiments as the next Soviet dictator.

Communism has been defeated as a viable ideology, but the after-effects remain for whatever reason. Fast-forward to 2003 and we had a majority of the world - quite literally - absolutely certain that Bush was invading Iraq in order to steal oil. Let's for a moment leave aside the "nothing could be worse than America stealing xyz barrels of Iraqi oil - it's better than 27 million people live under a cruel dictator than exceed the xyz figure" meme, as that's more of a moral judgement so some other forum is probably more appropriate (narrative?). Also ignore the fact that who actually cares what Bush's personal reason was - he was just one of 150 million war supporters in the US alone - so it's irrelevant even if the dogma turned out to be true. Let's just examine the dogma in its own right.

How the hell do you get that many people to believe a proposition without a shred of evidence?

Assuming this dogmatic position could be dropped, and replaced with "yeah, I'd like America to liberate more people actually - my personal favourite order (wish-list) is ...", we could set about liberating more people.

Technically, the statement could actually be true. We don't currently have the technology to dissect Bush's brain and demonstrate the chain of logic that concludes with "invading Iraq is a good idea".

We do have the statements he made - but of course he could be lying.

But he alone does not set policy. There's a lot of other people involved in a democracy. Even before we get to the 150 million Americans who supported the war, and the 10 million Australians etc. None of these people have spilled the beans.

The invasion did actually go ahead - where's the oil? Did they change their mind or what?

None of the Iraqi politicians - not even anti-American ones like Sadr, are pointing to a loss of xyz barrels of oil being stolen.

Wars are bloody expensive - simply the interest on the war costs would have been enough to buy whatever oil was required - where is the calculation that oil makes economic sense?

America actually gives foreign aid - the exact opposite of stealing. If it wants money to flow in the opposite direction, it can take the first step easily enough simply by stopping foreign aid.

Regardless, even if you want to ignore the massive amount of logic and evidence suggesting that the reason wasn't for oil, why have such supreme confidence in this highly speculative position? I assume it's projection that is causing the problem? If someone personally would never go to war to help someone else, they probably assume no-one else could be so benevolent, so based on that, they're sure of their conclusion, even if they can't put their hand on a shred of actual evidence.

kerravon wrote:I assume it's projection that is causing the problem? If someone personally would never go to war to help someone else, they probably assume no-one else could be so benevolent, so based on that, they're sure of their conclusion, even if they can't put their hand on a shred of actual evidence.

Actually, I have a suspicion that is a genetic trait to distrust/dislike those in power (for good evolutionary reasons) and their brains haven't managed to correctly classify Bush as someone who was never in power - the democratic system put huge constraints on his personal power.